The Cowboy and his Elephant (22 page)

Bob turned to Jane. “She
remembers
me,” he said, with tears welling in his eyes.

He had stayed in Amy’s heart. She would stay in his forever. She would never leave him, nor he leave her, in the permanent ways of the heart.

Circus people live partly in a make-believe world of brightly colored lights among the fictions of the show—artifice, illusions, and dreams. If they try hard they can even convince themselves that they are ageless, just as long as the show goes on. Buckles and Barbara had devoted their lives to this dream, but now change was coming to their world, overturning everything that they had ever known to be true.

In the winter of 1999 two incidents forced Buckles to wonder out loud to Barbara how elephants had lasted this long in the circus. “In the old days, they were its backbone. Today they’re just a liability.” And that meant Ned, Anna May, and Amy.

In the first incident two women protesters from a radical animal liberation group backed a dump truck up onto the sidewalk on Amsterdam Avenue, at the rear entrance to Lincoln
Center, where the Big Apple was performing under its own big-top tent. In the rearest enclosure to their dump truck, on the other side of an iron fence, Amy, Anna May, and Ned were keeping warm in the elephant barn. It was a bitterly cold winter afternoon. The women dumped thousands of rotten apples out of the truck onto the sidewalk and then, quickly, before the police arrived, they put out signs reading:
THE BIG APPLE IS ROTTEN TO ITS ANIMALS
.

In the second disturbing incident that same winter, the Big Apple was camped in a field outside Princeton Junction, New Jersey, and its performers, handlers, and their animals were asleep. Suddenly an explosion lit up the sky. The main tent, the wagons, and the trailers all seemed to be ablaze. Two circus workers asleep in a trailer barely escaped the flames. The next morning the fire marshal found the shards of a Molotov cocktail. Another animal liberation group that cited the captivity of Amy, Anna May, and Ned as their cause claimed the “credit.”

The Woodcocks—indeed, the whole Big Apple Circus—reacted with concern. Buckles told Barbara, “I can’t imagine us continuing on. Elephants in circuses have become politically incorrect, that’s all.”

“The people from these groups would rather see our elephants dead,” Barbara said angrily. “You can’t tell them the truth, because they won’t listen. There’s no place with a waterfall and a unicorn where these creatures can go.”

“The issue won’t go away,” said Buckles. “It’s not just our elephants, it’s the principle of the thing.”

_____

N
o one had ever cared more for elephants than Barbara Woodcock. They were her “kids,” and she had lived for almost thirty years within easy calling of Anna May and, more recently, of Amy and Ned. But now, she was forced by her health to be satisfied with their images in her RV.

Back in 1979, when she was with Ringling Bros. Circus World in Florida, she was riding atop an elephant, a leopard beside her in a howdah—a large elephant saddle invented by the Indians long ago. She entered the darkened ring. Buckles was walking beside the elephant. A child in the audience snapped a flash camera, and the startled elephant jerked away. Barbara lost her balance and fell. The leopard came down on top of her. The audience thought she was being attacked. Barbara says, “He was licking me. He was worried for me.” The base of her spine had hit a board on the ground, and she had fractured her bottom vertebra and ruptured a disc. A sliver of bone had pierced the nerves in her spine. From then on, when she was performing, jumping off horses, running and riding elephants, every time the sliver moved Barbara went numb with pain.

Now, years later, she lived with morphine. This oncevivacious woman who had danced on the backs of elephants could hardly walk anymore. And she spent her days in reminiscence: “When I hear the circus music coming through the trailer windows I sometimes start to cry,” she said. “I was in the ring before I could walk. I was an introvert who created
this outlandish person who danced and performed with animals. I just made the person up. And when I had to stop because of the pain, I didn’t know which person I was—the introvert or the outlandish one.”

She asked Buckles one day, “Who would take care of the elephants if you couldn’t go on?”

Buckles didn’t answer her. A complex dilemma faced him. What if something
did
happen to him? Not just anyone could take his place as the elephants’ custodian, disciplinarian, and show master. With each passing year Amy and Ned, now preteenagers, needed more of about everything. Ned was big, rambunctious, and stubborn. Amy was maturing, and soon she would be ready to mate. Their constant bickering often led to fights. Who but Buckles could stop them?

Each day before sunrise Buckles got out of bed to feed them. He was often working in their barn late at night. He cleaned the stalls four times a day and exercised the elephants, watered them, and worked with them. Their grocery bill, which he paid out of his own purse—for fifty bales of hay, four bags of monkey biscuits, and carrots for treats each week—amounted to $407 and grew with the elephants.

Worst of all Buckles never stopped worrying that the elephants might hurt someone by accident. He had liability insurance, but that wasn’t what bothered him. The circus audiences thought of the elephants as real-life Dumbos, but they were wild animals. One day in a moment of
exhaustion he told Barbara, “I’d just like to get where I could stay home and not worry about somebody getting hurt.”

“Well, what are you suggesting?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. But I do know that everything has to come to an end.”

I
n Colorado, Bob was aware of Buckles’s dilemma through conversations with Maguire. Bob weighed his interest in Amy’s future welfare against his reluctance to interfere in another man’s personal affairs. One evening, thinking about what would happen to Amy if Buckles decided to retire from the circus, he heard about a possible solution. As he had earlier when he was looking for a home for Amy, he tried to find out more about an unusual younger man named Randall Moore.

O
n a snowy night long ago, Randall Moore arrived as a stranger at an exotic animal farm in southern Washington. Moore’s first thought was, This is a good place to hide out. At the time, as a college dropout with no aim in life, he was trying to avoid the U.S. Selective Service and the certainty, as he saw it then, of being sent to die in an unpopular war in Vietnam.

He offered his services, such as they were, to the owner of the farm. He had enthusiasm and energy, and not much else. But the owner of the farm hired him anyway. Few
young men his age had the desire to handle wild animals. Even so, though the animals were exotic, the job was hardly glamorous, and the pay meager. Moore mucked out the stalls and fed and managed Phil, the lion; Joe, his cage mate; Andre, a Russian brown bear; his mate, Sonja, and Tanja, their baby; the hybrid bears Natasha and Sasha; five performing Asian bull elephants billed as “the Tuskers of Thailand,” and three African elephants—Durga, Owalla, and Tshombe, orphans like Amy from a cull.

Tshombe was a big bull, fifteen years old, headstrong and independent, with handsome tusks. Owalla, a teenager, was the trio’s matriarch, with a strong will and the inclination to use force to instill discipline; Durga, a submissive and docile younger female with cherubic features and long eyelashes, just wanted to get along.

Moore studied their traits and saw a reasonable reflection of himself. As African elephants they were a misunderstood species. He felt the same about himself. The African elephants had a reputation for being unmanageable. Moore’s parents thought of him that way and had told him so. The elephants were stubborn; Moore’s teachers had chosen to use the word “intractable” to describe him. The elephants were endangered as a species, and if the army caught him, that was what Moore would be.

The owner of the farm, Morgan Berry, an older man with a twinkle in his eye and a colorful past, loved to tell Moore stories about strange animal happenings in some of the far-flung places he had visited in his lifetime. At the kitchen
table one night, he described a place in the former Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of Congo) called Gangalana-Bodio, where captured African elephants long ago were trained to pull plows and clear the land of mahogany trees.

“African
elephants?” asked Moore. “I thought they couldn’t be trained.”

“Apparently those rumors are wrong.”

“Then what about Owalla, Durga, and Tshombe?”

“Why don’t you see what you can do with them?” Berry replied with a challenge his young employee was quick to take up.

O
f the three African elephants, Owalla was fast to learn, Tshombe needed constant reassurance, and Durga was unsure and slow. Over the winter months of training—as he taught them to perform simple exercises—Moore formed an emotional attachment to them. As the year progressed, he decided that circus tricks diminished their majesty, and embraced a strange commitment for their future together: It was right and principled for them to go back to where they were born. And he, Randall Moore, would take them there.

It was a dream he kept to himself in the year that he, with Morgan Berry and Berry’s companion, an animal trainer named Eloise Berchtold, took their animal acts on the road. Eloise trained Berry’s Asian elephants, performing with them as part of the Rudi Brothers Circus. The life fascinated Moore for a short time, but finally he decided that it wasn’t
for him. The draft was no longer a worry once the lottery was introduced, and he received a high number that surely would keep him safe. Now, with his newfound freedom, he wanted to continue to work with elephants as an anthropologist, and for that he was going to need an advanced formal education.

He left Berry’s employ in the mid-seventies to enroll in Florida’s Santa Fe Teaching
Zoo,
working at nights as a hotel maintenance man and a lab technician to pay the tuition. He quickly learned the philosophy and ethics of animal conservation. He discovered how the destiny of humankind was linked with that of its fellow creatures. He read every book in the library about African elephants and, to satisfy his curiosity about Africa itself, he found other books like Isak Dinesen’s
Out of Africa,
which filled him with the romantic desire someday to explore that part of the world. He was restless to begin with. He never stayed with one thing for long. Soon he dropped out of the teaching zoo to join a project in Mexico studying an endangered species of turtle.

When Morgan Berry was killed by one of his own Asian elephants, a bull named Buddha, Moore flew to his farm to take over the care of the animals. Berry’s lawyer and the executor of his estate greeted him with an offer to sell him the farm and its animals.

“I can’t afford that,” Moore told him when he heard the price. “I can’t afford
anything.
But I’m the only one who knows these animals.”

“Then the animals will be sold off to zoos,” he was told.

“Not zoos or circuses, please!”

“Then where else?”

“I don’t know. I just want something positive to happen to them,” Moore said. “I want to take Owalla, Tshombe, and Durga back to Africa.”

“On what?” He asked fifty thousand dollars for the three.

“I don’t have anywhere near that much,” Moore told him.

“Anyway, wouldn’t it be like taking coals to Newcastle?”

“I’m not talking about
all
elephants. This is about these three. I know them. They are my friends. They are orphans, and I don’t want them to go to a zoo or a circus.” He thought, This is a chance for all of us, the elephants
and
me. Make up your mind. Right now, for once,
finish
what you started. Get them back to Africa and set them free!

“Let me see what I can do,” he told the attorney.

“You’ve got two weeks,” was his reply. “Then they go to the highest bidder.”

W
orking out of a phone booth, Moore called a magazine editor he knew in New York City, who referred him to the producer of a television program on ABC called
The American Sportsman.
Moore pitched his idea over the phone. After a lengthy silence, the producer asked, “You’re serious?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“You want me to ask Roone Arledge to buy three elephants and ship them to Africa? You must be crazy.” At the time Arledge was the head of ABC Sports.

“That is what I’m asking, yes, sir,” Moore replied.

“Well, it might be nuts enough to be a good idea. I need a show.”

“I need a sponsor.”

The producer paused, thinking back. The previous summer he had been sitting around a campfire in the wilds of Kenya with a naturalist, a photographer, and a tourist camp operator, who had wondered out loud, “Wouldn’t it be neat to get elephants out here to ride around on and view the wild animals?”

“It sure would make a good show,” the producer had said. And the idea stayed in his mind ever since.

“What do you say?” Moore asked him.

“Let’s do it!” he told Moore.

He offered him a two-year contract, the cost of Berry’s three African elephants, and all expenses paid.

W
ith a newly minted
American Sportsman
credit card, Moore bought shovels, brooms, and bales of hay and rented a semi to drive the elephants to a cattle ranch near Tampico, Mexico, that he was offered for free as a staging base for the sea voyage back to Africa. Owalla, Tshombe and Durga had to learn how to carry men on their backs, as Moore saw it, as a necessary skill that would help him to reintroduce them into the African wilds. Moore was learning himself by trial and error, sticking to a singular dictum: “Infinite patience, skill, and a certain degree of insanity will get me by.”

On the appointed day, the cargo ship SS
Mormaclynx
left its pier on the East River in Brooklyn with a supercargo of three elephants in open-topped steel containers. In his suitcase Moore carried visas, medical reports, entry permits, and the promise of high government officials to let him and his elephants enter Kenya, on Africa’s east coast. The thirty-six-day voyage around the Cape of Good Hope began in New York Harbor with the sight of the Statue of Liberty and the promise for Moore of a dream come true.